Thursday, 7 February 2013

Anya Lipska and Where The Devil Can't Go

Anya Lipska is a TV Producer and
scriptwriter who has worked on a wide variety of programmes ranging from BBC
Panorama and Channel 4 Dispatches to documentaries on science, history and the
arts. Where The Devil Can’t Go is her debut novel featuring her two main
protagonists Kiszka and Kershaw. She is
currently hard at work on the second book in the series.

I had always assumed I would one day write a book and a few years ago, I
decided it would be a crime novel. However,
before I could embark on creating a cast of characters and a twisty turny plot
of the sort I enjoy, I needed to find a setting and a subject that interested
me. Then it struck me that London’s
Polish community might offer an intriguing and different backdrop for a novel
that would be part classic detective murder mystery and part political
thriller. To be strictly accurate, it was my husband
who first suggested the idea of a Polish detective living in the East End, but
after five years had passed without him writing a word, he generously let me
run with it. Even more importantly, as a
Pole himself – who’d, left Poland in the early Eighties when it was still ruled
by a Soviet-backed communist regime – he offered a privileged insight to the
culture, language and history.

The Poles are the UK’s biggest single group of immigrants. We interact with them in shops and bars, they
work in our homes as builders, au pairs and cleaners, their kids sit alongside
our kids at school…but to most of us they remain something of a mystery.

As I began properly to research the book, I decided the old adage ‘write
what you know about’ was all wrong. I
think that as long as you do your research thoroughly – and as someone who has
worked as a journalist and TV documentary producer for twenty years that was
the least of my challenges! – writing
about the unfamiliar is less of a
struggle. Being the outsider allowed me
to approach things afresh, as though viewing them through the eyes of a reader. I did not have to agonise over what people
might find interesting about Polish culture and history: I worked on the basis
that what grabbed me would probably grab them, too. My husband’s memories of his upbringing were
wildly exotic in comparison to mine: from romantic activities such as picking
wild mushrooms, hunting for wild boar and making birch sap wine, to the grim day-to-day
reality of Soviet communism – queuing for hours to buy toilet roll and flour,
and dared to take part in a pro-democracy demonstration.

The personal details helped me create a back-story for my ‘hero’, the
private eye Janusz Kiszka, and its political history gave me my plot. Kiszka is asked to
find a missing 19-year-old waitress by his priest but what looks like a
routine missing persons job puts him on collision course with DC Natalie
Kershaw, a tough young female detective investigating the murder of another Polish
girl. Janusz soon finds himself
embroiled in a sinister conspiracy with its roots in Poland’s Communist era,
when he was part of the struggle for democracy.
Returning to his home town of Gdansk, he finally unravels the secret in
the cellar of a former secret policeman.

Poland’s extraordinary history also gave me a crucible in which to forge
Kiszka’s character. Half a century of
totalitarian rule first by the Nazis and then by Communists, has left a
distinctive stamp on the character of the Poles. Alongside their powerful sense of tradition
and a small ‘c’ conservatism, with the Catholic church at its core, lies a
visceral distrust of authority and the machinery of state. Kiszka embodies these
contradictions, operating in the shadowlands between criminality and old-fashioned
respectability, and prepared to use violence while observing his own, particular
moral code. One reviewer put it
well, I thought, when she described him as an ‘anti-authoritarian urban knight’.

While the book clearly isn’t a documentary, I hope readers will take
away something of the spirit of the Poles and their culture, their sense of
humour, and their extraordinary bravery in fighting for their freedom throughout
the twentieth century. Above all, I hope
they think it’s a bloody good read…

More information about Anya Lipska and her work can be found on her website.

Where the Devil Can’t Go is published by The Friday Project 7 February, £7.99.